Hopeling

Let me elaborate here, because I didn't mean it as a meme response. Certainly a sentinel is the #1 most obvious fit. But archetypes almost never map perfectly onto media, so I wanted to offer an alternate take. Iron Man has been my favorite superhero since before the MCU, so this isn't a putdown. The movie version is not ultra squishy by any means, but then, neither are blasters if built for it. They're just not as tough as their melee teammates, same way Iron Man is not as tough as Thor. Comic Iron Man should for sure be something like a Sentinel, because he routinely shrugs off attacks and it's a rare, exceptional event for a suit to be destroyed or even visibly damaged. But the MCU version frequently sustains visible heavy damage - on quite a few occasions, to the point of disabling or destroying an entire suit. Yes sometimes that's because he's fighting Thanos or Ultron, but sometimes it's "just" because he took a beating while fixing the helicarrier prop, or because the Mark 42 got clipped by a truck, or because he was in the thick of a fight with the Chitauri for too long. And meanwhile his key piece of tech is a functionally unlimited energy source, and he displays a wide variety of attacks at both range and melee. There's some conceptual space for power armor that isn't totally indestructible, but maybe a bit ablative and modular and replaceable. MCU Iron Man leans more in that direction than other iterations of the character. And if you think that's an interesting take on the character - I do! - then a blaster might fit that feel.

Wormhole is the 90s AOE stun that many control sets have, except it's also an improved version of Fold Space that lets you choose both the targets and the destination. With Wormhole, plus the way Singularity pulls things in, both slotted for KB>KD, grav control has a level of control over mob positioning that Axe Cyclone or Fold Space can only steam of.

MCU Iron Man is kind of a blaster, honestly. Dude has absolutely wild damage output, but trashes his suits on the regular.

No, they do correspond to the AT modifiers, but they also correspond to their recharge. That's how powers usually work, longer recharge means higher damage. The scrapper version of claws has faster, lighter attacks, and the brute version has slower, heavier attacks. It's not quite a straight port, it's a modified version of the powerset. For another comparison against a power set that is not modified between ATs, the scrapper version of Spin does less damage than Broadsword's Hack (98 vs 102), while brute Spin does more than Hack (78 vs 68).

Due to AT modifiers (.75 vs 1.125), scrappers normally have 50% higher base damage with the same power. But scrapper spin has only 25% higher base damage than brute spin. In other words, once you account for fury, brute claws hits harder. That's the tradeoff for being slower.

Dull Pain costs 10.4 endurance and has a base recharge of 360 seconds. Dark Regen costs a whopping 33.8 endurance base and has a 30s recharge. Toggles contribute too, but the incredibly expensive spammable heal is a big part of it.

Fulcrum Shift is a very good power, but I'm more interested here in powers that are qualitatively unique. The border on that is a little fuzzy, of course. Like, crashless nukes do kinda qualify because wiping out a whole spawn in one shot will feel crazy if you haven't played a blast set before, but numerically it's just a strong aoe power. FWIW, those aren't even HC changes. The inherent was like that on live for years. Sustains and crashless nukes were i24 changes from the original devs, it's just that i24 never made it out of beta before shutdown.

I've played CoH for a long time, but not nearly every AT and powerset. Sometimes when I try something new, certain powers will fundamentally change how I interact with the game. My most recent example is playing a Grav controller, which has Wormhole, kind of an improved Fold Space with more control over targeting and destination. Wormholing the next pack into my ongoing Storm killzone is great fun, and quite unique. Some other examples, both major and minor: Every travel power changes how you think about getting around a zone. Being able to stealth missions instead of fighting through them Taunt auras to prevent runners Playing with/without mez protection Confuse powers to pit mobs against each other What are some other powers that do unique things, that change how you interact with the game?

Inspirations are a fundamental game mechanic. Even when you don't need anything else, you can still combine them to make reds for more damage. But if you have no reason to use inspirations at all, that probably just means you can turn up the difficulty instead.

There aren't enough stats to go around. Fully enhancing acc/dam/end/rech would be 400% total pre-ED, and in your screenshot for example, the four pre-ED values in that set only add to 349.8. You usually don't need or even want all four of those stats ED-capped, anyway. Damage usually, recharge occasionally, acc and endredux you just need "enough" and even just 60% is routinely more than enough. And if a set needs all 6 pieces to cap its damage at 50, it's going to be terrible at level 30, and heaven forbid you run less than 6 pieces. The original devs in particular seemed to very deliberately design sets with weaknesses, like Obliteration having very high recharge (and giving a recharge bonus) but little endredux. I don't know that this really had the effect they wanted overall, since in a lot of enhancement categories there are still sets that are obviously better than the others, but it doesn't seem fair to say that a set is only "properly designed" if it's perfect with no downsides or tradeoffs. Making a build is about tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is deciding if you want that 6th slot just for the set bonus.

It reduces the recharge of the toggle. Nothing affects how quickly you reenter hide. And yes, the ability to slot recharge in most toggles is quite pointless.

To throw another name in the ring, She-Hulk is *very* clearly Super Strength as a powerset complete with foot stomps and hand claps, she starts at full power and doesn't ramp up, she is best known for her solo work, and she struggles a bit to fill a role when she's on a team, all things that scream "I'm a scrapper, not a brute and not a tank".

For what it's worth, I think it would make significantly more sense to remove the defense crash, rather than to leave it in and make the set OP to compensate. For one thing because that's just weird design, and for another because how much of a penalty it is varies wildly by armor set. It's OK for attacks sets to have some degree of synergy or anti-synergy with primary/secondary, but "borderline unplayable with SR and you don't even notice it with Elec" is too much variance IMO. That second part is totally fixable; just make Hurl and Hand Clap powers you actually want to take. The set already has powers that aren't just punching, they're just terrible.

I think we are talking past each other somewhat here. SS should not have a defense and endurance crash just to do the same damage as other sets. That's just true. People specifically avoid playing SS with defense sets because the crash is too punishing.

Right, again, I agree that the defense crash is unnecessary and should probably go. The endurance crash could go too, I don't feel strongly about that either way. The damage crash, you can't just remove without other changes, because that crash is why SS is merely on par with the other best sets, instead of a huge outlier.

Right, we agree that the attacks in SS itself are mostly bad. Removing the crash wouldn't fix that. You would still keep leaning on Gloom and Cross Punch, you just would be better at it. If anything, Ston testing with Willpower underplays how impactful Rage is, because it's not buffing Burn or a damage aura. Yes Battle Axe doesn't have a crash, but it doesn't get a 120-second duration on Build Up either. A defense crash, no, as I said before. A damage crash, objectively yes, because that tiny difference is after accounting for the crash. It's not on-par and then has a crash to boot, it's well ahead and then brought back to mid-to-high-tier due to the crash. Again, I hate the crash and I would be happy to see it go; it's simply not fun regardless of how good the power is overall. But removing the crash and leaving the power otherwise the same would just buff the set to outlier levels without fixing the weird reliance on pool attacks. I think you have to make broader changes to both Rage and the other SS powers to address that.

SS isn't middle of the road though. It was #1 for brutes in Ston's rankings, for example, and not #1 but still S tier for tanks. Without the crash it would likely be a pre-nerf-TW level outlier; you can get an idea of what that would look like by shaving 10-20s off Ston's pylon times and 30-40s off the Trapdoor times. I don't think this should be surprising to anyone; just glancing at the power info will tell you that Rage is Build Up except with quadruple the uptime. It is a very good power even with its downside, so good that it props up the whole set (and any actually-good attacks you can get from elsewhere). I mean, I hate the damage crash; it's incredibly annoying to play. But just removing that would be a pretty significant buff to SS, without addressing the fact that the attacks are mostly trash, and that seems like the wrong place to start. The defense crash could easily go; it already basically didn't exist on live, and it is disproportionately punishing to some armor sets while ignorable to others. The -def should at least be resistable, or replaced with a resistable -res, which would be exactly equally punishing to all sets due to the way that damage resistance is also resistance debuff resistance. The end crash is fine. Nobody cares that eg Hasten has an end crash, and it's kind of thematic that going into a rage could leave you exhausted.

Do you mean vertical progression then? Horizontal progression is the kind of progression that does not grow your power.

I agree with basically everything you said, and I think this one is the biggest fundamental problem with trying to fix or proliferate SS. It's a kind of terrible powerset by itself, propped up entirely by the insane buff power that is Rage, particularly its ability to boost secondary/pool/epic attacks. You can't nerf SS because then it's truly terrible, but you can't buff it or the Rage interaction takes over the world. I think that, if you radically reworked the set and made other parts of it awesome, that might be enough for the playerbase to not riot too hard against reworking Rage as well and you could end up with something like a decent set. Maybe something like this: Jab, Punch, and Haymaker go from 2/4/8s recharge to 4/8/10s respectively, with damage increased to match. Hand Clap now does damage. The regular damage formula would put it slightly higher than Foot Stomp, but if that's too crazy, on par with Dark Obliteration would still be worth taking and using. Hurl's recharge increased to 12s (maybe higher), damage increased to match, with reduced damage in an aoe, similar to Thunder Strike. Hey look! It can now run a decent ST chain without pools, it has multiple aoe attacks, and two of the most thematic powers are good instead of automatic skips. Now you gut Rage in one way or another, and that's OK because the set doesn't lean so hard on it. Maybe you make it, say, a 30s buff on a 120s cooldown like Soul Drain, and at that point it probably doesn't need a crash at all.

I don't think there is such a gap; literally a majority of armor sets have both resistance and defense. In particular it sounds like you're just describing Invulnerability here: it has some resists (but not great except to S/L), some defense (but not easily capped to everything like SR), even a little bit of healing in Dull Pain that you can either conceptualize as the wearer occasionally being able to power through the damage that their armor doesn't stop, OR as a limited self-healing capability like Infinity War Iron Man's nanites. It even has a psi hole, as you would expect physical armor to. For a more street-level body armor like Batman or Punisher, Willpower fits great. For high-tech power armors, EA, Elec, or Rad can also fit very well. Power sets tend to be designed based on what they do and not where they come from, so that the player has more freedom with concept. If bullets bounce off you, that's Invulnerability, whether it is due to armor or you just have unbreakable skin.

What differences would you want? Invulnerability and Willpower are already good all-purpose low-FX options, and elec or energy fit well for many power armor types. I'm not just trying to dismiss the request; I'm legitimately not sure what you are looking for here.

What exactly is the difference between that, and playing Invulnerability or whatever other set with the power coming from your armor? The name of a powerset is pretty unimportant; people can and do routinely play Broadsword and actually wield a khopesh, or Water Blast and tint it green to make acid blast, or other such conceptual substitutions. Is there some particular gameplay or aesthetic you'd hope to get out of an Armor set that none of the defensive sets currently do?

The tanker damage scalar has been 0.95 ever since it was raised from 0.8 in i26p4. That just means tanker base damage is 95% of what a blaster would do with the same (melee) power.

Vuln could maybe be stronger in magnitude or have better uptime or something, but at least conceptually I think it fits Sentinels well. We are more of an ST class than blasters, and instead of raw personal damage like stalkers, we get a shot-call mechanic to both highlight and weaken a priority target. This is not only useful, but helps answer the question of what role Sentinels are supposed to do on a team.

That's exactly why you don't want the armor visuals tied to your powers instead of your costume. You wouldn't have nearly as much ability to customize.